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the transit—home to street, street to home— is there any place,

reason, or chance for female intelligence that is not simply looking

for the best buyer?

*

So ladies, ye who prefer labor to prostitution, who

pass days and nights in providing for the wants of

your family, it is understood of course that you are

degraded; a woman ought not to do anything; respect

and honor belong to idleness.

You, Victoria of England, Isabella of Spain— you

command, therefore you are radically degraded.

Jenny P. D’Hericourt, A Woman's Philosophy

of Woman; or Woman Affranchised, 1864

The sex labor of women for the most part is private—in the bedroom—or secret—prostitutes may be seen, but how the johns use them may not. Ideally women do nothing; women simply are

women. In truth women get used up in private or in secret being

women. In the ideal conception of womanhood, women do not do

work that can be seen: women only do hidden sex labor. In the real

world, women who work for wages outside of sex are dangerously

outside the female sphere; and women are denigrated for not being

ideal— apparently idle, untouched by visible labor.

Behind the smoke screen of ideal idleness, there is always

women’s work. Women’s work, first, is marriage. “In the morning

I’m always nervous, ” Carolina de Jesus wrote. “I’m afraid of not

getting money to buy food to eat.. . . Senhor Manuel showed up

saying he wanted to marry me. But I don’t want to. . . a man isn’t

going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to

write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow. T hat’s

why I prefer to live alone, for m y ideals. ” 21

The woman in marriage is often in marriage because her ideal is

eating, not writing.

Women’s work, second, is prostitution: sexual service outside of

marriage for money. “I’d like so much to have the illusion that I

had some freedom of choice, ” said J . in Kate M illett’s The P rostitution Papers. “M aybe it’s just an illusion, but I need to think I had some freedom. Yet then I realize how much was determined in the

way I got into prostitution, how determined m y life had been, how

fucked over I was. . . So I believed I’d chosen it. W hat’s most

terrifying is to look back, to realize what I went through and that I

endured it. ” 22

The woman in prostitution learns, as Linda Lovelace said in

Ordeal, “to settle for the smallest imaginable triumphs, the absence

of pain or the momentary lessening of terror. ” 23 The woman in

prostitution is often in prostitution because her ideal is physical

survival— surviving the pimp, surviving poverty, having nowhere

to go.

Women’s social condition is built on a simple premise: women

can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked

and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated,

“penetrated” is substituted for “fucked”: women can be penetrated,

therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to

men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men

must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be

penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does

not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women

must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must

run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must

use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs

that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are

somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of

the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of

sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It

has nothing to do with what a woman is.

Women are born into the labor pool specific to women: the labor

is sex. Intelligence does not modify, reform, or revolutionize this

basic fact of life for women.

Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound